Piedras Blancas and Parque Arvi (Luis)

Thursday & Friday, December 29 & 30, 2011 - Many of you know that Medellin is located in a deep Andean valley. On Thursday, we took a trip literally up and out of the valley. We took the Medellin Metro to one of the two MetroCables. The Line K MetroCable line climbs from the valley floor up through two intermediate stations to the top of the Santo Domingo Savio neighborhood where the new Biblioteca España library is located. From there we transferred to the Line L gondola line that travels 3 miles in 14 minutes to the Parque Arvi nature preserve. It is a pretty amazing experience to travel by gondola from a crowded city center to the nature park where you don't see any development in such a short amount of time.

We had reservations to stay at the new Piedras Blancas Hotel and EcoPark. We got a little unlucky when we got off the gondola because it had started to rain. Further, we expected a clearly marked van or bus that would take us to hotel. That wasn't the case and we wasted about 20 minutes and missed about 5 buses before figuring out that every bus except the first one that we checked went past the hotel.

The hassle was quickly forgotten when we go to the hotel. It is located deep in forest on the edge of a small reservoir at 8,200 feet of elevation. We had a late lunch and relaxed before enjoying a bottle of wine on the terrace. There are only 24 rooms at Piedras Blancas and it was fully occupied, so it was very quiet and peaceful.

The next morning I went on a guided hike through the forest. The hike took us through the native forests and the non-native pine forests that were replanted after the native wood was harvested early last century. The utility company that owns and manages the forest is slowly harvesting the pine trees and actively encouraging the regrowth of the native plants. In both forests there were interesting growths of moss, once commonly used in peoples home to decorate the nativity scenes. This practice is now discouraged. To emphasize the point, some of the locals had made a natural nativity scene in a moss patch out of sticks and pine cones. Yet another great Colombian pesebre. The other highlights were the Mario Bros-like mushroom and the blue snake.

Before leaving, I took a ride on the zip-line (see video below). It's called "canopy" in Spanish.